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A Single-Camera Dramedy, Just in Time for the Fall Season

Will someone in Broadband Hollywood just give lonelygirl15 — and, all right, her producer and sidekick danielbeast — their own show already?

In her videos, she perfects the emo girl-in-her-room pose, balancing playful and moody as she muses about her life and times. She has huge online fame; repressive, religious parents who probably know nothing about YouTube; and a sibling-ish love affair with her video editor. What could be more 2006? Obviously the implication from the stills that promote her videos is that she’s going to strip, but she never does, and she controls that shell game by being sweetly deaf to innuendo.

One of her critics — a guy who thinks she’s a fake in part because she’s lighted too beautifully — says her life so far is “almost Shakespearean in the way it played out.” And that cowboy-hatted critic is appealing too! (Of course, she also has her share of protectors. Warning: plenty of cussing ahead.) So it’s time to get “lonelygirl15,” the full-on series, going. Invite the parodists and critics to round out the cast, give some play to the idea that she’s a fake, and create a perfect “My So-Called Life” for the MySpace hordes.

MTV Overdrive, I’m talking to you. (And while we’re at it, MTV, get your broadband channel to work on a Mac NOW.)

Mac users always fail to realize how few they are. It is a pain and expensive to create a parallel system for so few people. Don’t believe the product placement in movies, only 6% of our website’s visitors for example come from mac users (almost 3% use lineux for comaprison).

It would be like demanding MTV translate its site into spanish NOW, but at least there are a lot of people who speak Spanish.

You wanted an expensive white computer, and now you have it. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to jump.

In regards to lonelygirl, I think it would be great if she had her own TV show but no one would watch it. After all the entertainment is obviously on YouTube. I think she is so very talented that MTV or WB should pay her or sponsor her on these video blogs. Then again… sigh everyone would then assume she’s fake which would be so further from the truth.

Lonelygirl has a delimma, keeping it real or going commercial. My thinking is keep it real and not try to exploit her. I think her dreams are in science and physics. MIT/Harvard are you watching???

Totally agree… these two have tons of talent, and Bree is incredibly smart and gorgeous! They have a very bright future in front of them.

Not sure that a TV show would be the best idea – part of the appeal is the ‘do it yourself’ type of entertainment that they provide. We know that it’s coming from them and not from a corporate production team (at least theoretically). It would definitely be interesting to see what they do, though, given the tools and the budget to produce more online content…

Is it really fine for you to use an underaged girl’s picture without her prior permission? I simply don’t know enough about that area of the law to know whether her consent to images on YouTube means that images from that site can be used anywhere else.

By the way, I’ll admit that I’m also sensitive to the fact that lonelygirl’s appeal — and ability to do what she’s doing in the first place — stems from the fact that her parents don’t know about YouTube. It’s quite plausible that they might know about accessing the New York Times via the computer, though, and I’d hate for them to run across this piece and spoil everybody’s good time. Still, it’s a legitimate legal question about her picture accompanying this piece.

I think she (if she is real) is planted and backed by big money. It appears as though her video diaries are part of a pre-pilot/launch to build the fan base. Her videos are too professional and I’m not buying it…reeks of a professional viral marketing / word of mouth campaign.

#7: She’s obviously not underaged, in my opinion. Although that is probably a major reason she’s so popular, unfortunately. (Seemingly) voyeuristic videos of a pretty “underage” girl? That’s a sure-fire recipe for success on YouTube. But that’s exactly why it would never work as a TV show — the illusion would be gone, and you’d be left with an ambitious, pretty 20-something and her ambitious, male writing/production partner. Hardly worth watching.

# 1: Trying to mock Mac users by pointing out how few of them there are doesn’t work. In fact, that’s the key to Apple’s cult-like appeal. If everyone really started buying Macs, hardcore Mac users would be emotionally devastated. And if there are so few of them, why waste your breath baiting them, anyway?

3) “Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a lonelygirl15. She exists certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no lonelygirl15! It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.”

Oh, please. Keep television and YouTube seperate. She’s just a girl who saw a bunch of video blogs and had a nice camera. Lighting isn’t that hard to take care of and putting her on television would completely ruin the improvising done on the videos which is WHY they’re so good.

I find it truly entertaning people are calling them fakes set out by the big coperations!! But mehh there will always be skeptics for everything in life. lonelygirl15 and her “friend” are just providing some good old fashond entertainment for yea all.

lonelygirl and danielbeast fakes and set ups by big corporations?? Haha! That’s a good one. Anyone who blogs enough knows that popularity is not difficult to come by. You just need the right charm (which she has), controversy (which people are creating with these debates about whether she’s real or not), and spend enormous amounts of time on the internet making friends.

Just a side note to those of you who commented above: being a professional video editor, I can tell you that her videos are not professionally done. Her lighting looks like a desk lap shining at one side of her face and sunlight on the other. and the video editing is at the level of someone who is computer savvy and read their iMovie handbook. And who cares how old she is?

She wouldn’t make a good television show at all. Her blogs are too quirky and would not appeal to a broad teenage audience. Just leave her as she presents herself to be: a real, talented teenage girl who blogs online about silly stuff plaguing her mind.

As a Mac user, I have to admit you’re right. If everyone’s computers ran an operating system as intuitive, beautiful, and straightforward as OS X, I’d be seriously upset at having lost my elite status.

Mac users are very influential, much bigger than whatg they represent online. Only a single digit porcentage of people using Macs (4%) does not mean they are not important or influential. As an example, 45% of Wired Magazine users, a magazine read by influential people interested on advances in technology, life and culture, are Mac users (by the way, Jews are 0.5% of the world population but they account for more than 20% of Noble prizes).

Yeah…parallel systems are tough…you have to decide to use a format like quicktime or something that works well for both platforms. That can be hard because it requires you to make a good decision. Ouch my brain hurts, time for another breakfast.

While I am not a professional video editor (I just do it occasionally for fun), I agree with Lisa (8/2, 1:51pm). It’s not hard to imagine how a bunch of kids with some extra time on their hands can pull this off with the tools available today.

Virginia’s woes with MTV have nothing to do with “creating a parallel system for a few people”. MTV insists on using Microsoft Media Player — and that creates problems for people on *all* platforms, including Windows. Special media players are flaky, hard to install, and conflict with other media players. Smart purveyors of streaming video, like YouTube, have abandoned them in favor of flash-based media, which is far more reliable and portable.

Virginia Heffernan is The Medium columnist for The New York Times Magazine. Previously she spent four years as a television critic for The New York Times newspaper. Before coming to the newspaper, she wrote for Slate, and before that she was an editor at Harper's and Talk magazines. In 2005, she published a comic novel, "The Underminer," which she wrote with Mike Albo.